


Fault

by angel_deux



Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Escort Jaime, F/M, Queen Brienne, and then i just sort of gave up and was like w/e it's good will hunting, except he's retired now and basically just hangs out in his gf's castle, ft olenna tyrell's mom energy, it gets a bit good will hunting, it's what he deserves tbh, retired escort jaime has anxiety about dating a queen, which was an accident until it wasnt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-31
Updated: 2020-12-31
Packaged: 2021-03-11 02:15:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 19,986
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28463691
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/angel_deux/pseuds/angel_deux
Summary: Jaime, a retired escort, has been dating Brienne, queen of the Stormlands, for a few months now, and everything's going fine. But that's only because the scandal hasn't broken yet. It will. It's inevitable. And when Brienne's good name is dragged through the mud again, it will be Jaime's fault.Sequel to "Worth".
Relationships: Jaime Lannister/Brienne of Tarth
Comments: 30
Kudos: 211





	Fault

**Author's Note:**

> here's a nice lil sequel to Worth for the end of the year! It's been hanging out in my drafts for a while, and mostly I am sick of editing it, so here you go! Happy New Year :)

“You are worth it,” Brienne told him, and Jaime has heard it every day since, even when she doesn’t speak the words aloud. It echoes in the way she smiles at him in the mornings, and in the way she reaches for his hand in the daylight, and in the way she makes space for him in her life and in her home. When he met her, he thought that she was afraid of being seen, but he’s the one who hesitates now. He never realized how used to it he had grown. Being hidden.

He wonders at how quickly she has already changed. She was so afraid of it, before. He saw it in every tense line of her body, every time he looked at her. Before he ever touched her, she was ready for his judgement. Assuming it was coming. Trying to hide the softest parts of herself away so that he would not perceive them. Now, she offers herself to him freely. She would be with him openly. He wonders if she has any idea of the storm that’s coming.

He knows what she went through with Renly. He watched the way the press gleefully tore Tarth’s princess apart for her obvious heartbreak and the obliviousness that made it possible. She had failed to understand a political arrangement and believed too earnestly in the things a boy said to her. Nothing more salacious than that, but it was the kind of thing the press loved. Earnest hopes crushed to nothing. A young girl who grew up in the public eye and was still too idealistic and naive to understand the way the world worked. People love nothing quite as much as they love feeling superior, and it was easy to feel superior to a child like Brienne. Jaime had pitied her, at the time. Now, he knows she has gotten past it. They have talked about it more than once, and he knows she isn’t the same girl she was then, but still he fears. It is so easy for old wounds to come flaring back to life, even when you think they’re fully healed.

_Are you?_ he wonders, when she tells him that she’s ready to face whatever the press has to say about him. She seems so certain, and he has spent most of their acquaintance so far building her up, and he doesn’t want to stop. He _wants_ her to believe in herself. He _wants_ her to think she can survive anything. But what if she can’t? He wants to protect her from it. But how can he, when she does not seem to think that she needs to be protected?

He believes that she cares about him. They haven’t spoken the words aloud yet, but he believes that she loves him, the same as he loves her. But love is so easily twisted into hate. Maybe he was easy to love when he was secret, and hers, alone in her hotel room. He was not a man with baggage attached. He was an escort. A fantasy. She looks at him like she knows him, and he knows how much of himself he has already given her, but how can she be sure? How can she _know_? _You’re worth it_ , she said, but he wonders.

He hasn’t been in the public eye in years, but he remembers what it was like. And he was a boy lauded for his golden good looks, and he grew into a man largely the same. Scandals never quite touched him, because they never got to the heart of the things that he cared about. But they got to his family, so maybe that’s not quite true. He saw the way that the press exposed scandals that ate away at the people he loved and eventually ground them into the dirt. Destroyed his father. Sent Cersei on a spiral she never managed to climb out of. Turned Tyrion hard and bitter and cold and made him into a man willing to do _anything_ to avoid being so exposed again. No matter how hard Jaime tried to save them. No matter how much he loved them. It wasn’t enough. His love was not stronger than the ridicule, and it was not stronger than the cruelty, and it was not stronger than their own destroyed expectations for themselves.

Maybe there’s something odd in the fact that Jaime’s impulse was not to scrape the family back into relevance. All of the rest of them tried the same tricks. Jaime was different. He leapt happily further into the shadows, putting his body to use in a way that ensured he would have to _remain_ in the shadows, even if his family found their way back to the top. Maybe it was a choice, to dodge the scandal and to never let it touch him. To work for people like Chataya, who had the power and the willingness to protect him and keep his name out of the papers. Keep him secret. He knew that some of his clients delighted in fucking him _because_ of who he was, or at least because of who he used to be. He gave them fake names, and they smiled and stripped him and hated his father, but he was very good at making them forget that. Wresting power back without letting them realize that that was what he was doing.

It wasn’t all like that. If it was, he never would have lasted as long as he did. Most of the time it was just a job. To him and to the people who hired him. Professional. Brusque. Even the oddest situations had a kind of careful sheen over them. Stannis Baratheon and his wife looking for help navigating their sexual awkwardness, refusing to look like they were enjoying themselves until Jaime and their sex therapist, Melisandre, coaxed it out of them. Oberyn Martell recommending Jaime to basically everyone in his extended family, and paying for Jaime to stay in Dorne for several months, gleefully introducing him to everyone as “King’s Landing’s finest delicacy”. Jaime liked his job. Sometimes he even loved it. There was a lot of messiness tied up in it, and sometimes he thinks that he could have dealt with the emotional side of things in a healthier way, but he wouldn’t change it for anything.

Well. He _thought_ that he wouldn’t change it for anything.

He’s never done something foolish like fall for a client. Even when he liked the people he was fucking, he never felt more than friendship, or companionship. It didn’t take very long at all for sex and emotions to become divorced in his mind. He’d been able to fuck people he considered friends and then grab drinks with them a few days later with no tension between them. His friend Addam, king of the Westerlands, hired him by accident the first time, not knowing that the escort he’d chosen was once his school friend. But that turned into a regular appointment, and it was never more than momentarily strange. Strange maybe because Jaime’s father had plotted to wrest control of the Westerlands and restore it to the Lannister family. Strange maybe because that plot had failed, and the Lannisters were cast down, and because maybe there was an initial assumption that Jaime was doing what he was doing because he had no other options. But it was quickly discussed, gotten over, and their friendship was as easy in the bedroom as it ever was anywhere else.

But Brienne. He fell quickly for Brienne. Maybe if he’d realized it was happening earlier, he would have been able to stop it. Slow the fall, at least. He’s glad he didn’t, in the end, but it still feels like a bit of a ding on his professional pride.

Maybe he should have expected it. Maybe the biggest surprise is that it didn’t happen sooner. He’s always been a romantic. Maybe that’s not something that most people would expect. When he was at the height of his career, when he was going from appointment to appointment, constantly fucking and being fucked, drawn in by the fact that he was _wanted_ , always wanted, he rarely thought of love. Tyrion, who treats _asking_ _difficult questions_ like it’s a personality trait, once asked if it was because Jaime thought he didn’t _deserve_ love, but Jaime thinks Tyrion was probably projecting. It has never been about deserving. It’s just easier to _not_ think about the things you don’t have, and so that was exactly what Jaime did.

It was what Brienne did, too. He knew that early, he thinks, though he’s not sure when he realized it. She stumbled over her words and always looked at him with that hangdog look, like she was begging him to put her out of her misery. Speaking her desires aloud seemed to cause her almost physical pain. Most people don’t feel entirely comfortable talking about the things they want out of sex. Not in the seven kingdoms, anyway. There’s still this inability to see sex and sexual desire as anything but taboo. Shameful. Secret. And Jaime was an expensive date, so the people who hired him were often from old families. Nobles, who tend to be more repressed than anyone.

He quickly got used to clients being surly about it. Folding their arms across their chests and staring into the middle distance when he tried to ask too many leading questions about the kinds of things they’d like to try. Sometimes it was almost like a game, trying to figure out what made them tick when they were so resistant to expressing it. He’d always hated that, but it was different with Brienne. She wore her discomfort so openly, and from the beginning he had been drawn to it. The way she wanted so much but was afraid to ask for anything at all. The way her blush extended down to her chest. The way her eyes darted. The way she nibbled on her lower lip. She was a study in something, and he didn’t know at first what it was, but now it seems obvious that he was falling in love with her. Not from the beginning, surely. But it feels like it, now.

* * *

It was a choice made for many reasons, Jaime becoming an escort.

( _A whore,_ Tyrion said once, half-drunk. _Let’s call it what it is, shall we?_ )

When the Lannisters fell out of favor, they fell hard. Tywin overreached. He planned to bring Addam down with a scandal, and Jaime doesn’t _want_ to believe that it was a scandal involving Addam’s sexuality, but he doesn’t know. He only knows that despite all of Jaime’s warnings and all of his pleadings, Tywin was confident of success, and felt that he was _entitled_ to success. _The Lannisters were kings long before the Marbrands_ , he’d said. _And I will take our throne back._ But he was stopped. Olenna Tyrell, queen of the Reach, learned of the plan, and she knocked Tywin from his imagined heights with as little effort as she would have deleted a fucking spam email.

Tywin fell, rocked by various scandals that Olenna brought to light, and he sent the entire family tumbling down from the perch where they’d been precariously existing, and Jaime felt nothing so much as free. He had and still has pity for his family for the fact that they weren’t able to feel it. They’d never found Tywin’s expectations to be the burden that _he_ did. Tywin began trying to climb back up immediately. Cersei scrabbled at the walls of the cliff until her fingers were bloodied. Tyrion sat back and planned and schemed about how he’d get to the top of the cliff one day without appearing to put in any effort at all. Jaime walked away, and he threw himself into the one thing he knew he was good at.

Well, he was good at fighting, too. But fucking seemed more lucrative, and it was a funnier thing to use to make his father ashamed of him.

A _lot_ of the choice was made as a way to make his father angry, actually. His fury and his guilt and his exhaustion all combined and made him just hateful enough to relish in it. He had tried, for so long, to make his family see sense. He tried to be the counterweight to them. It didn’t work. They never wanted to listen. They thought he was stupid and weak for trying to get them to be satisfied with what they _did_ have instead of constantly striving for more.

Walking away and refusing to help the family scheme would have been an offense on its own, but burning bridges by becoming an escort, a shameful stain on the Lannister name, was unforgivable, and it was a freeing choice to make. He had burned those bridges with glee.

Tywin was a miserable, narcissistic man who didn’t think he was one, and he’d made Jaime feel small for years. _You are my heir. My son. You will carry on my legacy._ He looked through Jaime, not at him. He saw not a boy, not a child, not his son, but a pawn. A piece on a game board that Tywin could place wherever he wanted, and use however he wanted. A body. Empty and meaningless. He would have torn the world apart for power, and Jaime watched it, and he knew that he was not his father’s son.

Tywin deserves some credit, maybe. Jaime felt like a body. He _was_ a body. He used that body, then. He thought it was sort of clever. Maybe Tywin never made the association, never understood that Jaime chose what he did in part because of the way Tywin had never valued him for anything but the form he was born in.

It was, at first, a bit of a surprise that he ended up enjoying it. Not just the sex, although the sex was good, and often thrilling. He hadn’t had much experience when he first started out, but he knew he was good at it, and he knew he liked it. When he was younger, sex to him was tied up with emotions. With how much he cared about a person. Sex was sex regardless, but he’d never felt the urge to seek it out the way he saw some of the other boys doing. He’d been worried, a bit, that he wouldn’t be able to perform unless he liked someone as a person, but it didn’t end up being a problem. He was separate from his body sometimes. Not in a terrible way, like he retreated because he didn’t want to face it. But like his mind and heart remained untouched and unbothered while his body performed acts that he was glad to perform. _It’s a job_ , he’d said, more than once, to a disbelieving Tyrion and an infuriated Cersei and anyone else from his real life who figured out what he was doing to make all that money that he was using to support his siblings once his father was dead and the money from their trust funds had run dry. _It’s a job_ , and he had meant it, and they had never understood.

His therapist once asked him why _. Why do you like it? Why, if sex isn’t something that you think you would seek out very much for yourself, did you choose this profession, and why do you enjoy it?_ She, like most of the people in Jaime’s life who knew him as Jaime and also knew what he did, was probably worried. Maybe she assumed that the root of it was some trauma that he’d never addressed. Or maybe she thought he’d only done it, and only continued it, because he believed he was trapped. Once he started, it would have been difficult to stop if he _had_ wanted to. He understood why she worried. It would have been difficult to get a respectable job, and it would have been more difficult to go back to not having the money that whoring brought in. But it was never like that, for him. He was lucky.

From the beginning, it had been made clear that he had other options. When he retired, it was because he’d had enough, but it wasn’t because he thought it was horrible, or because something happened that made him want to flee. He was just getting older. He had responsibilities, with Cersei in rehab and her two children living with Tyrion, because Tyrion thought—and the courts would likely agree—that even a shady businessman like Tyrion was a more respectable guardian than a man who slept with rich people for a living. And it wasn’t even like Jaime thought he needed to retire _to_ be a better guardian. It was just…he wanted to be there, for them. He wanted to have time to take them on school trips and make sure that they were happy. He’d been the primary breadwinner in the family for years, and he’d made enough money through whoring and then investing to feel comfortable stopping. And with the children around, he couldn’t spend months in Dorne anymore, and he didn’t have the energy to flit between clients, charming or disdainful or clever or dull depending on who he was seeing.

He told Brienne once that he didn’t _perform_ when he was fucking, but maybe that was a lie. He never went fully outside his personality. He always let people know by his actions how he felt, and he always kept a barrier between himself and his clients, but he toyed with the edges of it. He would shed parts of himself for people who wanted only certain bits. He was never his whole self with any one of his clients. Not until Brienne.

_Until Brienne_. He keeps thinking it. _Until Brienne._

The thing Jaime had settled on, with his therapist, after weeks of not being able to tell her _why_ he took so much pleasure in his job _,_ was that after Tywin burned himself out trying to mold the world into a shape that would give him what he wanted, Jaime wanted to do the opposite. It wasn’t conscious. It wasn’t like he sat down and made a list of things that would undo the damage that Tywin wanted to do. If he had, he probably would have ended up in politics. But it was an unconscious move toward the kind of profession, for the kind of _reasons_ , Tywin would have found incomprehensible. He made connections, political and otherwise, with people that Tywin would have gladly fucked over in his quest to be the most powerful person in Westeros. Jaime had no interest in fucking them over; he fucked them, and let them fuck him, and he didn’t use them for anything other than their bodies and their wallets. More than that, he _gave_ to them. He made them happy. He chipped away at the loneliness that every powerful person carried within themselves.

If there was one concrete lesson that Jaime took away from his years in King’s Landing, it was that everyone was lonely. The people in power, the people from the old houses, they were lonelier than anyone. No matter what they were like outside in the world, in their hotel rooms and in their mansions and in their fancy clubs, they were lonely, and they wanted something, and Jaime could give it to them. _Give_ , in whatever way he could, when his father wanted to do nothing but _take_.

He tried to explain it to Tyrion once, because he thought that Tyrion would understand. Tyrion professed to hate their father more than anyone. But when Jaime said the thing about giving and taking, Tyrion had not understood. Not in the way that Jaime was hoping, anyway. Tyrion had only laughed and called Jaime a “ _vag-ilante_ ”, even when Jaime pointed out that most of his clients didn’t have vaginas. Tyrion never cared much about the logistics of his jokes, and he never understood Jaime’s bisexuality, either. Tyrion saw what he wanted to see, and didn’t see what he didn’t want to see, and he treated the whole thing like it was a big joke, a fun whim, a way to make their father angry that would end eventually when Jaime got tired of it and came back to help the family in some kind of proper, Tyrion-approved way, with lots of moustache-twirling disguised as something kinder.

And when that didn’t happen, and when Jaime got rich enough to take care of himself _and_ the rest of the family, Tyrion wrote Jaime off. He took Jaime’s money, and he treated him well enough, and he always offered Jaime a place to stay if he needed it. But he wrote Jaime off all the same. He decided that Jaime wasn’t clever enough to seek power the way that Tyrion wanted power. It was a subtle thing, maybe, the way that his treatment towards Jaime changed. Or maybe it wasn’t subtle at all, and Jaime just did a fair enough job of pretending not to notice.

It meant that Tyrion stopped trying to pull Jaime in on all his shady little dealings, so in some ways it was fine with Jaime. But it stung, still. The fact that Tyrion didn’t understand. 

Brienne, though.

Brienne understands.

He was surprised by that at first, but he isn’t surprised anymore. He knows her good heart, and he knows she’s capable of empathy in a way a lot of her set isn’t. He’d been idly interested in her policies, especially when she was working with Chataya, and he knew that she was a good queen, but actually meeting her, actually getting to know her, it was different. He should have known, but he’s almost glad he didn’t. Almost glad that there were parts of her that he was surprised by.

Maybe he should have known from the start because she’s friends with the Starks. The Starks don’t suffer fools, but they’re even less likely to suffer those who abuse their power. Jaime is friends with the Starks, too, thanks to a childhood friendship with Catelyn Tully that she refused to let die even when he was sure she would.

(He’d been embarrassing about it, in hindsight. Cut off contact with his friends from before. He let them think that he was humiliated by his father’s scandal, but really he was afraid of what they would say if they found out how he was making his money. In the case of most of them, he turned out to be right. Catelyn showed up at his apartment six months later with a roll of bills and a dry question of _do I need to fuck you to keep hanging out with you, or are you going to stop being such a dick_?)

Sometimes Jaime likes to imagine that he and Brienne would have met through the Starks even if Jaime wasn’t the escort she hired on a whim, but he also doesn’t think he would have fallen for her as hard as he did in any other context. Meeting her the way he did was important, because he saw all of her so quickly. Her willingness to be vulnerable. The struggle she went through to let down her walls, and the way it felt like a victory when she did. Maybe, if she hadn’t been paying for it, if she hadn’t been able to turn her brain off and treat the excursion like the choice it was, he wouldn’t have had the tools to get past those defenses. She would have been the same polite, emotionally distant woman she is in front of the press, and he would have gone home impressed, but not overly so, and he never would have thought of her again except when she made the news for some new policy that made him think _a good queen. I met her once_.

Gods, what a depressing thought.

So it’s difficult to say. Would he trade it? His past? Almost always, it’s a no. Brienne understands, and he likes to tell himself that she’s the only one who matters. Sometimes he even believes it. But that’s not the sort of thing that can last very long, realistically. She may be the only one whose opinion he cares about, but what about _her_? Jaime knows from experience that sometimes it can be surprising, how much the judgements of people outside can end up mattering, even when you don’t think they will.

The scandal _will_ come out. People will have opinions. The papers will be breathless about it, but people in her life—her friends, her subjects—will have thoughts, too. The longer he’s in her life, the more certain the scandal gets. Already the rumblings have started. _The Evenstar’s possible new beau_. The gossip sites claimed personal trainer, at first, then potential new advisor, and then head of construction at Evenfall Hall. But there are a few pages that always speculate sex and romance above all else, and he’s seen tentative whispers about it already. Jaime Lannister, of the Lannisters who once held Casterly Rock. Generations ago, sure. The Lannisters haven’t been kings in centuries. But it sounds nice.

_Tywin Lannister_ , those sites crow. _Remember him?_ Paparazzi pictures of Jaime and Cersei as teens, shadowing their father to some event. _Remember this? I wonder what they’ve been up to._ Cersei’s latest rehab stint flew under the radar entirely, which means the Lannisters have fully fallen into obscurity, but it won’t take long for people to start digging.

Jaime has fucked half the nobility in King’s Landing, probably. Not to mention visiting dignitaries from other places, and prominent businesspeople who aren’t tied to the aristocracy and therefore won’t have the same kind of hangups about revealing what they do in their free time. How many people will recognize him when he starts appearing in photos beside Queen Brienne? How many people have been sworn to secrecy by that agreement they signed with Chataya but will break it for a big enough payment and a little bit of clout? Brienne is a popular ruler with popular policies, but she has her share of rivals. Stannis Baratheon. Will his shame at hiring an escort overwhelm his desire to see Brienne taken down a peg? The Targaryens? Aerys is one of the only potential clients Jaime walked away from before the first meeting was over, and the old man can hold a grudge. He’s always pushing Brienne when they have to negotiate something. Will _he_ be the one to spill it? There are just too many potential leaks. It _will_ happen. It’s a question of _when_ , and it’s killing him.

* * *

He mentions it once, in her bed.

(She calls it “our bed”. She calls it “our room”. True, Jaime arrived months ago and has only left for visits to see Tyrion and the children, but that doesn’t mean the bed or the room are _his_. His clothing is still in a duffel bag shoved into her closet. He technically has guest quarters, somewhere, though he’s never seen the inside of them. Just the door on the way by.)

He says, “there was an article about me today. Did you see it?”

“I did,” she says. She’s propped up next to him on one elbow, looking down at him. The fingers of her other hand trail over his collarbone. He likes those touches best. The idle ones she wasn’t sure were allowed before.

“Did you read it?” he presses, and she gives him a look like she thinks he’s being a shit.

“I did. It was a blurb, not an article, and there was nothing alarming in it.”

“It’s going to come out.” 

“I know,” she says, blithely, like that doesn’t matter to her at all. It boils inside him. Annoyance. He can’t…how can she not see? How can she not understand that she’s going to be dragged through the mud by this? For _him._ What she fears more than anything else in the world—exposure. Being laughed at—it’s going to happen. It’s going to happen on a huge scale, all over Westeros. The papers. The people she has to face when she negotiates with them. She’s going to have to bear it, and she’s going to realize that she was wrong, when she told him that he was worth it. How can she dismiss that like it’s nothing? Doesn’t she realize it’s going to ruin them?

* * *

There was a time, when he was just starting out. He was given an opportunity to leave. Another queen, offering him an exit. He didn’t take it.

He hadn’t started working with Chataya yet. The man he was working with was less refined, less organized. He sent Jaime off to the hotel suite with no name or no preparation at all except a vague reminder that Jaime could leave if he wasn’t comfortable.

He almost did. Olenna Tyrell destroyed his family. She destroyed his father. Yes, they deserved it, but it was still a shock when she opened the door for him. He could not imagine any reason for it except some kind of sick power play. He was angry, and hurt, back then. Cynical to an extreme. He wouldn’t have put it past her. He wouldn’t have put it past _anyone_.

Most of his clients, with their thrill at fucking the Lannister heir and getting back at Tywin by keeping the black sheep in comfort, amused Jaime. They paid well and usually fucked well, and that was all he allowed himself to care about. It would have been easy to feel shame about it, but Jaime didn’t. But something stung, about Olenna. _Haven’t you done enough?_ he wanted to ask. She invited him in. Old even then, Jaime thought, because he was young. He’d have fucked her, if she wanted, but she told him to sit down, and she had her attendant make Jaime a cup of tea, and she reached across the table and took his hand in hers.

“I heard what you were doing,” she said. “And I wanted to make sure that you were all right.”

The tenderness of that inquiry. The soft, motherly, grandmotherly way she looked at him. He _was_ all right. But it made him want to cry anyway. No one had asked him.

Even Chataya, when he eventually started working with her, even with all her understanding and her patience and her kindness, never thought that there was a reason to ask that question. To her, their work wasn’t shameful, and it wasn’t something to be afraid of. It wasn’t something that someone would choose to do out of desperation, or because of some deep-seated trauma they hadn’t yet addressed. Chataya grew up on the Summer Isles, where sex work was lauded. Celebrated. Jaime loved his job, and he was glad he had chosen it. Even early on, he never felt desperate. He never felt coerced. But from the outside, he could understand why it would look that way. And it was just nice, maybe. That Olenna cared enough to ask.

“I’m all right,” he said, and then his eyes were welling with tears even though he was telling the truth. Olenna squeezed his hand once before releasing it, and she suggested adding a little honey to his tea for his sore throat, and she pretended not to notice when he wiped at his eyes.

“Are you sure?” she asked. Her voice was grave, serious. When he was young, before his father’s fall, and they would cross paths at some function, she had always been cheeky and clever in a way that he looked up to. A way he had wanted to emulate. The thorny Rose Queen with her barbed words and her amused smiles. The few times they met, he was always trying to make her laugh, because he was always trying to make everyone laugh, and she was one of the only people who didn’t look at him like he was unseemly for it, for not behaving like a proper little boy. Sometimes she _did_ laugh at his japes, and sometimes she returned them.

She wasn’t laughing in that meeting, though.

“Your father is a monster,” she told him, setting aside her tea. Tywin had still been alive, then, and Jaime understood suddenly that she had been keeping tabs on him. On all of the Lannisters, apparently, but on Tywin, especially. Whatever Tywin was planning to try and catapult himself back into relevance, it wasn’t going to work as long as Olenna was alive. Jaime felt oddly soothed by that, but that only made him feel more guilty. “I’m not sorry that I stopped him in his quest to take power in the Westerlands, because it is my firm belief that Westeros is the better for it. But you children. You were collateral damage I did not intend. I’ve tried to help your sister, but she refuses it. I’ve done what I can to make sure that Tyrion has his connections, and I think he’s going to make something of himself. And you.” She looked at him piercingly. “You were always my favorite. A good boy, a flower among weeds. I thought they would choke the life out of you, but they haven’t. You’ve surprised me.”

She said it like that was _something_ , and maybe it was. Olenna Tyrell didn’t strike him as the kind of person who was used to admitting that she had been taken by surprise.

“I started doing this because I want to,” he said. “I’m fine.”

It was true, and he was being honest, but she looked at him for a long while afterward, assessing. Whatever she saw in him, it made her nod, and reach for a pad of hotel stationary on the console table behind her. She wrote down a phone number. She slid the paper across the table to him.

“The man you’re working with is taking too much money off the top,” she said. “And he’s not reputable enough for many of the higher class clients. You’ll make more money with Chataya. Tell her I sent you. And if you ever want to stop, for _any_ reason, come and see me. I’ll find something else for you to do. I want you to know that you have options, Jaime.”

“Thank you,” he’d said. Maybe a different man would have ripped up the paper as soon as he was out of the hotel room. Maybe a different man would have resented the woman who destroyed his family, condescending to him like that. Offering him options and a job as if it was that simple. But Jaime was not a man like that, and he took the gesture as it was intended. He contacted Chataya. He found that Olenna was right, and that the man who had been in charge of his appointments before _had_ been taking too much of his profits. Chataya was kind, and she cared about his comfort, and she made him feel safe. And he knew that if he ever wanted to get out, he could. It was good to have it there, in the back of his mind, even if after a while it began to feel like it was too late. Not that he couldn’t quit if he wanted to. He never felt like Chataya was pressuring him or forcing him to stay. But Chataya’s client base was huge, and he fucked a good portion of them. Politicians, lawyers, businesspeople. Septons, even. The kind of people who were rich enough to spend obscene amounts of money on sex. The idea of holding down a _regular_ job became laughable. What would he even do? Become a teacher? That seemed like a scandal waiting to happen. A businessman? What sort of business? Anything reputable would have questions about the decades-long gap in his resume. What kind of job had Olenna even imagined she would offer him? Something working for _her_? His presence at her side, in her cabinet, advising her, whatever she thought he’d be good at, it would be seen as a threat, at best, after he spent so many years in the beds of her competitors. So he never took her up on it, even when he decided to retire.

He never regretted it, not taking the out. But now he thinks about it. And he wishes…

Well. It wouldn’t be so difficult, maybe, if he had taken the escape route earlier. There would still be headlines, and gossip. He would have still been a whore, for however brief a time. But he didn’t leave, and so he was not a whore for a short spell in his early twenties, which might have been excusable, because men in their twenties are given many passes, especially when they are rich. But he was in business for years. His whole career. That won’t be so easily glossed over, and so he remains a liability.

* * *

But Brienne doesn’t want to talk about it. She shuts it down when he mentions it. She rolls her eyes fondly at him. Kisses him. She coaxes smiles out of him when they’re in public. She takes his hand when they walk together. The thought of sudden camera shutters makes him want to yank his hand back, makes him want to hide in her castle forever, make himself into a maiden locked away in a tower, but she is so sturdy and so trusting, and he knows he cannot hurt her by rejecting her support. She wouldn’t understand.

He would have been glad to remain hidden. Maybe glad is the wrong word, but he was used to it. Hiding. Staying secret. He isn’t used to this: being in her life. It’s a wonder none of her household workers have leaked anything to the press yet. They’re always _around_ , and Brienne doesn’t seem to care. She never hesitates before reaching for him. It’s only Jaime who notices. The first time a maid walked in to clean Brienne’s room while he was still lounging in bed, he nearly fled. Hid in her closet. Tried to find his way back to his own room. Tried to _get out_ , because he couldn’t be seen. Hiding had become habit. He had become a shadow.

Does Brienne see that at every moment he is fighting an instinct to run, to hide himself away? Sometimes he wants to mention it. She wound understand, surely. She was like that, when they first met, about her body and her wants. It would be so easy to tell her. But he doesn’t.

* * *

He likes it in the morning best. She is soft in the mornings. Glad to see him. She touches his face with a reverence he certainly doesn’t deserve, but he always allows himself to sink into it. Mornings are easy, because they are in her room, in her bed, and they’re together, and it’s just like it was back in King’s Landing, when he fell in love with her, when he stayed that night and then ran away in the morning, feeling chastened and foolish for overstepping when she was still thinking only of the contract between them.

There is no contract now, and he never thinks about fleeing in the morning. She’s warm where her skin touches his. He curls around her, or tucks up against her, and he is calm. This tender, contented feeling that he has never felt. Care, and being cared for.

But as the day goes on, that feeling fades, inevitably. Because there is no contract, and there are no rules, and there is no secrecy. Because Brienne fell in love with him, and she isn’t considering what it means to fall in love with a man who was a whore for her peers. A curiosity and a favorite pet and a secret friend. It’s easy when it’s just the two of them, but it can’t last. How can she not understand?

* * *

Brienne wakes him one morning with a kiss. He doesn’t even have to open his eyes. Everything is warm, and soft around him. The pillow beneath him. The blankets on top of him. The window is open, the sea air just cool enough. Even the aches and pains of getting older, the occasional sore back, the way his joints crack, it has faded with Brienne above him.

“Wake up,” she says. “We’re going hiking.”

He groans and laughs and pulls away, burying his face in the pillow. She has been threatening this for weeks.

“It’s too early,” he says.

“You don’t even know what time it is.”

“I know it’s too early.”

She laughs, and he opens one eye to squint up at her blearily against the light from the lamp on the bedside table. He turns over to look out the window. The sun isn’t even up yet, and he groans again. But Brienne looks intriguing, dressed in a tank top and hiking shorts, and he decides that maybe he can be persuaded.

It’s odd, sometimes, to reach for her. To want her and reach for her and have her. She laughs at him when he sleepily tries to pull her close, and she unbuttons her shorts and pulls them down her long legs, and she straddles him almost roughly, and he’s fully awake and wanting her. She touches his face with a kind of gentleness that always makes him feel something blocking his chest, his throat, like this building need to cry that never bursts, because she’s still here and still touching him. He wonders if she realizes how easy it was to fall in love with her. The way she was always so tender, and careful, and willing to learn, and willing to be soft with him. It wasn’t something that Jaime would have even known to ask for, but with Brienne…

He isn’t sure what it is about her that’s so different. It’s not like she’s the first gentle person he’s ever been with. Plenty of his clients treated him well, treated him like he was delicate, treated him softly. Plenty of them wanted to be gentle, not harsh. But Brienne…it just feels different with her. Even from the beginning, he could see her own insecurities so easily, and he could see _her_ , even before he loved her. He found himself wanting to touch her, wanting to soothe her. Wanting to show her with his desire that she _was_ desirable, and wanted, and that she deserved every bit of what she was almost too afraid to ask for. Now, after, when he knows how she feels and there is no longer any contract, he hesitates sometimes. Like he needs a reason, even though he doesn’t.

He’s not used to reaching for people just because he wants them. Just because he loves them. Brienne settles over him, and his hands go to her hips. He knows all the ways she likes to be touched, because he has learned her, and because he was once a professional, and very good at making people come apart even if he didn’t love them. But he _does_ love her. It mixes up in his mind sometimes. Needing to justify his presence. Needing to make his touch mean something. Earning his place by her side.

Brienne, if she has those worries, she doesn’t show them. Not like she showed her insecurities when he first met her, and not like she showed her hesitance in those first weeks when they were figuring out how a relationship between them would work. Not wanting to make him feel uncomfortable, not wanting to overstep.

It’s odd, then, to feel like things are so settled between them in every way but one. Because Brienne doesn’t mind. She’s touching him now, and her body is rolling against his, waking him up with her hand around his cock and a wicked smile on her face. Did she ever think that she would do something like this? He never thought he would be in love like this.

She takes him inside her like it’s nothing now. But like it’s everything, too, because she never seems to take it for granted. She always looks at him like he’s giving her a gift, and he doesn’t understand that, either. _What gift?_ he wants to ask. _My cock? My body? That’s nothing. You’ve given me your heart, and you don’t even understand how precious that is to me._ Because she doesn’t. She laughs him off when he tries to say those things, and maybe it’s because he has this air like he’s not taking it seriously, but he is. It just feels like too much. Showing too much.

Growing up, he was never very good at keeping his emotions hidden. Not the way his father wanted him to, anyway. Tywin was stone and steel. A man. Men didn’t show emotions. Men didn’t cry. Men didn’t mourn their mothers. They didn’t mourn their wives, either. They locked themselves in their studies and drank until they were red-eyed and bleary, and even then they were hard and unyielding, even with two grieving children and a new baby to care for. Men also didn’t laugh so much, and men didn’t make jokes about serious things, and men settled down and made good choices to make their families more powerful.

Did men feel like this? With a woman moving above them? She’s bare. The light is coming in through the curtains, and she doesn’t care. She braces her hand against his chest, and he feels his heart hammering away, and he thrusts up into her, and his fingers are trailing over her, insistent and possessive in a way he isn’t, normally. He just wants to touch all of her, have all of her. He’s inside her, she’s around him, surrounding him, and she has him. She seems to know it. Why does it feel so fleeting to him? He doesn’t understand. He doesn’t want it to be like this.

After, she kisses him again, rolls off him, and gives him an arch look that makes him want to get hard again. Like an echo of arousal.

“Get up,” she tells him, and he laughs and buries his face in the pillow again.

“You’re going to wear me out,” he says.

“No I’m not,” she says.

“Thirty years without sex apparently gives you a deep reserve well, your grace, but I am an old man who needs a nap.”

“Nice try,” she says, and she tosses a t-shirt at him from where she has dug it out of a drawer.

A drawer. He freezes, and he takes it in. She has moved his clothing from the duffel bag in the closet to a drawer in her dresser. The one with the big mirror. The vanity that belonged to her mother. This ancestral Tarth home. Something squirms unpleasantly in him, but there’s an answering thump of his heart, too, when he sees how nervous she looks.

“I know we haven’t discussed it,” she says.

“No,” he agrees.

“But it looked pathetic. You living out of that duffel bag. Like at any moment…”

She stops herself, and she tosses him a pair of shorts, and he knows that she won’t finish the thought, but he knows what it was anyway. It’s a flash of something. Vulnerability that he hasn’t seen in her since he arrived on Tarth, and it makes him feel awful. Has it been there all this time? Has he just not noticed?

“I didn’t mean for it to seem that way,” he tells her. There is that lump in his throat again. That barely concealed panic. He wishes that he knew how to describe it. He doesn’t. “I just…”

“I know,” she says, but he’s not sure she does.

He wants to be ready to leave, yes. Maybe that’s part of it. He wants to be ready to go, when she decides it’s time. But he doesn’t want to tell her that. Partly because sometimes he’s afraid that if he _tells_ her, she’ll realize he’s right and send him packing. But mostly it’s because he knows how it will sound. How it would feel for her to hear it. He knows that it will hurt her, because she will see it as a value judgment on her, and not on him.

How could he tell her? _You’re the most honorable person I’ve ever known, and I know that if I let you, you’ll drag yourself through the mud for me, because that’s how you are. But I don’t want you to. I want to be ready for when you make the right choice._

You don’t. You don’t say that kind of thing to the woman you love. You smile and shrug and says, “thank you for the drawer, your grace”.

“Shut up,” she says. “Get dressed.” And the conversation is over.

* * *

He does like the hike. He likes her in the daylight. This, she knows by now. He likes it when he watches her use the muscles that she has so carefully cultivated. The way her legs look when she walks, thighs rubbing together, muscles bunching, calves stretching as she reaches to pull herself up through the rocky parts of the hike. The way her smile grows the further they are from anyone else. Jaime loves her. Her delight when he presents her with a little flower plucked from a wild bush. Her laughter when he tries to climb a tree like he used to when he was a child and nearly falls. Her pure, honest joy in being with him. It’s just the two of them, and they are more exposed than ever, but it feels nice, to be so far from anyone.

She packed a picnic lunch in her hiking pack, and she spreads it out with the kind of care and attention to him that always makes him half hard. She never understands she’s doing it. He should tell her, one day. Find the words. She looks at him as he’s sprawled out on the blanket, and her eyes darken, and she kisses him, and she takes him in her mouth, and he knows that he won’t find the words easily. He’s said to her before “remember when you touched me for the first time? Remember when you kissed me, and then you unbuttoned my jeans, and it was like you didn’t even mean to do it?” She always laughs with embarrassment and shushes him. _Remember? That was when I realized how much I cared for you. That was when you won my heart._ But those are the kinds of words you say later. Not now. Not when…

Well, he can’t pretend that he doesn’t think it’s going to end. She knows it, though she seems to be ignoring it, at least until he mentions it, and then she’s annoyed, tired, maybe hurt. If he had a choice, he would choose to be with her. Every time. He hopes she at least knows _that._ But he cannot feel good about staying with someone when he knows that his presence is going to ruin everything they’ve built for themselves. He isn’t worth it.

* * *

They’re making their way back down the mountain when it happens. They’re nearly to the end of the trail. Jaime is laughing at something she said. He puts an arm around her and kisses her on the temple. It has become habit, when they’re alone. Thoughtless little kisses like that, because he knows that they thrill her almost as much as it thrills him when she brushes her fingers through his hair. Idle gestures of affection. Brienne smiles, and he feels…

The shutter sound is so familiar. So engrained. He flinches. Takes his arm away from Brienne. The photographer is right in front of them, at the entrance to the trail. Barely out of the parking lot. How had Jaime not seen? He’s grinning. Jaime’s stomach sinks. Brienne smiles and says hello, unbothered, firmly polite when she asks the man to leave and respect her privacy. He bows and nods and turns away, because he’s already gotten what he came for. And he has no idea. A picture of the Stormlands queen and her new boyfriend. That’s what he thinks he has. He has no idea who Jaime is. What Jaime was.

“We need his camera,” he says. Brienne looks at him. Frowns.

“It’s too late, Jaime,” she says. Jaime starts after the photographer anyway. He has money. He’ll give the man whatever bribe he needs to delete that picture. Brienne grabs his arm, stops him. “Jaime,” she scolds.

“He’s a paparazzi,” he snaps at her, and he regrets the tone immediately. Brienne releases his arm. “He’ll sell it to someone. Varys, probably.”

“I know,” she says. “Jaime, I know. It’s fine. It was going to come out eventually.”

She sounds tired, resigned. He runs his hand through his hair. He looks longingly at the retreating back of the photographer, who’s stealing glances at them over his shoulder but hasn’t dared to raise the camera again.

“If they know that this…the second it comes out, Brienne…”

“I know, Jaime. We’ve been over this.”

And they have. That’s the part that makes it so impossible. They’ve discussed it to death. They’ve talked it over so many times. And every time, she looks at him like he’s bringing up old arguments. Trying to find faults where there are none. Patient, and loving, but exasperated, too. Like she can’t quite believe that they’re still talking about it.

“We haven’t been over it enough,” he says. Brienne shakes her head. She takes his hand.

“Do you want to be with me?” she asks. It’s an unusual question, from her. She doesn’t usually speak things so plainly.

“Yes,” he says, which is unusual from him, too.

“Then this is what has to happen,” she says.

“It isn’t. I could…”

“Go back to King’s Landing?” she asks. “Visit my hotel suite when I come back? Live without each other for more than half the year?” She’s annoyed, now, and trying to hide it only because they’re technically in public, though there’s no one else around still, so early in the morning. Just that weasel photographer, already in his car, probably calling Varys.

“Yes,” he says.

“I can’t live like that,” she replies. “And you shouldn’t have to.”

She’s firm, and he wants to melt before her, let her have her way, because it’s so tempting to believe that it’s possible. That she can weather this storm, with him beside her, and come out the other side stronger. But he has this impulse. This need to protect her from it. Maybe she _can_ weather it, but she shouldn’t have to. Not for _him._ What is he giving her, really? His body? She’s had it plenty, and he’s older now, and not as golden as he was, and soon he won’t even have his looks to charm her. Then he’ll just be a useless old man bringing scandal on a good woman, a good queen. It would be selfish of him not to look at it that way.

* * *

He calls Olenna.

She gave him her number, years ago. When she hired him not to fuck him but to make sure that he was all right. She told him to call if he ever needed anything, and he hasn’t, but he has liked knowing that it’s there. An emergency chute. He’s not sure how much fondness she still has for him, and how much responsibility she still feels for him. He isn’t young anymore, and his father’s fall was such a long time ago. He’s almost expecting the number to have changed. Or for his call to be ignored. It has been years.

But her assistant answers the phone as soon as it rings, and he’s passed off to the Queen of the Reach.

Her voice is as firm as ever. Older than it was, maybe, but none of the strength has left it. He has seen her from time to time in the years since, but never for more than a moment. Passing in the hall of a hotel. Going to a gala and seeing her there. Tyrion typically works in more underhanded ways, but he’s still invited to a lot of the more important events, and Jaime has, on occasion, been persuaded to accompany him. When he was younger, he liked the power of it, a bit. Showing up with Tyrion and seeing the whitening faces of his regular clients. Some, like Addam, were unafraid to come up to him in public and chat. Others, like Stannis, always found a way to be on the opposite side of the room, like he thought Jaime would embarrass him publically by referencing the odd shape of his cock, or something. There was this aversion to treating him like a person. Nearly half the King’s Landing set treated him like a pariah because he was a Lannister, and the other half because he was a whore, but there were a few who would always have a kind word for him, and Olenna was one.

Maybe that’s why he calls her. Or maybe it’s just because she’s the Queen of Thorns, infamously prickly, infamously able to get shit done. But it’s more like instinct. He trusts her. He knows she’ll help. She promised she would help. Childish, maybe, to take her up on it. Like a boy crying out for his mother’s help, except Olenna isn’t his mother. She’s a woman who saw his father to an early grave—whether he deserved it or not, there’s no denying her part in it—and saw his family half destroyed.

“You’re doing quite well for yourself, I hear,” she says.

“I suppose you’ve talked to Margaery.”

“Of course I have. But I wouldn’t need to. You’ve disappeared to Tarth, you fool. Everyone knows it.”

“That’s what I’m calling about.”

He can hear her voice, muffled, sending her attendants out of the room.

“Speak,” she says.

“A photographer caught a picture of us. We were coming back from a hike. It was…affectionate.”

“Affectionate.”

“A kiss on the temple.”

“I wouldn’t have taken you for such a prude.”

“You know it’s not about that.”

“No. I know exactly what it’s about. Margaery has been planning for it since the day Brienne hired you. You know that, don’t you? They didn’t walk into this naively. As much as I think it was foolish for them to pick _you_ , of all people. Someone more under the radar would have been wiser.”

“She’s not hiring me anymore, Olenna.” His voice is a harsh whisper. Brienne shouldn’t be back from her run for a while yet, but he still feels furtive, hiding in her room to make this call.

“She isn’t? That’s good. Margaery said, but I wasn’t sure…you don’t _seem_ like the type to use someone, but I’ve been wrong about people before. How _is_ Cersei, by the way?”

“Back in rehab,” he says shortly. “As you know.”

“Well, yes, but that doesn’t tell me much, does it? And the children?”

“Happier with Tyrion than they were with her, I think.”

“Yes. That’s good. Not my first choice of a guardian, but I suppose the courts could forgive a man who visits whores more quickly than a man who was one.”

“I’m not using Brienne. I…”

He doesn’t finish. _I love Brienne._ It’s true, but he doesn’t want to say it. He hasn’t spoken the words to Brienne yet. He’s certainly not going to say them to Olenna first.

“Good. I’m glad to hear it. Don’t sound so defensive, boy. I’ve told you before that I like you, but Brienne is an easy one to take advantage of. My granddaughter is a clever girl, but sometimes she’s too clever for her own good. It was a risk to open Brienne up to that kind of exposure.”

“ _Yes_ ,” he agrees, vindicated, still with that sickening swoop in his stomach. “It is.”

Olenna is quiet, then. He can hear her breathing, and he knows that she is thinking it over, and he waits to hear what she will say. She’ll agree with him, maybe, and it will hurt. Or she’ll disagree, and he’ll be stuck in the same place he has been. Unable to figure out what he should do.

“You must mean a great deal to her,” Olenna says finally.

“I,” he says. “I must.”

“I’ve never known a more careful girl in all my life. When Margaery told me that she’d agreed to hire you, I was proud of her, because I knew what it must have taken. But I would be lying if I said I wasn’t also a little worried. I’m even more worried now.”

“As am I,” Jaime says. Olenna sighs.

“Yes,” she says. “You want me to tell you to leave her.”

“No, I don’t.”

“No, you don’t. _Want_ was the wrong word. You don’t want it, but you think it’s what I should say, and you think it’s what you should do, even if it might kill you.”

“That’s dramatic.”

“Blame it on senility. But you know I’m right. I’m sure your father didn’t think losing his power would kill him, either. But here we are.”

“It won’t kill me to leave. And it won’t kill Brienne.”

“No, maybe not. The two of you are very similar. It’s why you’ve thrived when your siblings and father floundered. It’s why Brienne kept herself hidden away after my grandson’s husband broke her heart. You both are very good at compartmentalizing. If you leave, Brienne will survive. She’ll keep her hurt close, and she’ll suffer silently, and you’ll have to live with the fact that you were the one who did it. And you’ll go back to your life, whatever it was you were doing in retirement, and you will content yourself with feeling like you did the right thing, even if, or perhaps because, it was a thing that also called you pain.”

“I don’t want to leave. I don’t. And the thought of causing her pain… But…”

“I will take care of the photographer,” she says patiently. “Because I believe that, in time, you will come to terms with what this is going to look like. And hopefully that time will allow you to make an informed decision. I want the best for both of you. I’m not going to tell you what I think the best choice is, because I believe that’s something that you must determine on your own.”

“Thank you,” he breathes. He didn’t even have to ask her. She just knew. Of course she did.

“It’s going to come out eventually, Jaime. You know that.”

“I do.”

“It’s going to be a scandal.”

“I know. I keep telling her that.”

“She’s not the only one who’s going to be dragged into it. Will it bother you? Your name out there?”

“No.”

“I usually find that when someone answers a serious question so quickly, it’s a sign they haven’t given it enough thought.”

“You think I haven’t thought of it?”

“I think you’re impulsive, and a shit about some things, and I think this is one of them. You’re choosing to tie yourself to a _public_ figure. Think of how it looks. Not for her. For you. A man choosing to become an escort after his family’s fall from grace. Now you’ve chosen to be with a woman who is not considered attractive. A queen. A rich woman. A woman who, they will imagine, is grateful just for your attention. They will say you’re an opportunist. Ambitious, like your father. They will say you don’t truly love her. They may never stop saying that.”

“I know.”

“You will have to face their scorn, their distrust. Their disbelief. Brienne may be the only person willing to be on your side.”

“I _know_.”

“And you’re still thinking of Brienne. How will _you_ feel about it, Jaime?”

“They already know what I was.”

“The ones in our set, yes. They know. But we’re not talking about the people in our set. We’re talking about everyone.”

“It doesn’t matter to me what everyone thinks.”

“Doesn’t it?”

“No. I’m not the rest of my family. I don’t need their approval for my sake. I need it for hers.”

“You aren’t going to get it. Not easily, and perhaps not ever. There’s only so much we can do to mitigate the fallout.”

“So you’re saying I should leave.”

“I’m not saying anything of the sort, you foolish boy. I’m saying that you need to be prepared for what comes next. I have faith that you can handle it, but I won’t lie to you. It isn’t going to be easy. Not for either of you.”

* * *

He _is_ prepared. At least there is that: he’s prepared.

The photograph never appears. Brienne doesn’t bring it up, but she looks at him sometimes like she wants to ask. She doesn’t. Jaime thinks about what Olenna said, and he’s prepared _._

_I am prepared_ , he thinks, when Brienne falls asleep on his shoulder in the middle of a movie. _I am prepared,_ when she looks at him over the breakfast table and smiles. _I am prepared,_ when he sees her laughing with the children who come to see her on tours and can’t contain their awe at her height. _I am prepared_ , but he isn’t, and it doesn’t matter how many times he tries to convince himself he is.

It was easy to fuck people. It was easy because he could separate it. Sexual desire was something beautiful, and healthy, and he was glad to give it to people. But there was a kind of desire that was separate, for him alone. He has that feeling now with Brienne. No matter what they’re doing. If the sex is adventurous or if it’s tender or if it’s her or him doing the fucking. It’s for her. His heart is hers, his body is hers. He has never felt so complete, and sometimes it makes it hard to breathe almost to the point of panic, because he can’t imagine going back to _not_ feeling it.

Sometimes he thinks she sees it. The desperate, needy side of himself that only she has seen. He felt it for the first time when she kissed him and then reached for his cock, all innocent eyes and wicked hopefulness, a want to please him. He had never felt that feeling before. Not that his clients had never pleased him. They had, plenty. But the way she looked at him…he couldn’t describe it. It made him feel like he had been punched in the gut, and yet he had chased that feeling. Wanting to feel so important to someone. He doesn’t think he ever has, outside of her.

The thing about Brienne is that she is very difficult to read. She doesn’t think she is. And maybe there are some ways in which she’s not. She does have expressive eyes. Sometimes he looks into them and he imagines he can see exactly who she is. But other times, he wonders, and worries, and doesn’t know. When she still thought she was paying for a disinterested professional, he thought that she would see through him so easily. He lingered too long and he kissed her too often. But she had no idea how much or how little that stuff was normal for him. The whole time, she thought he was pretending.

And the whole time, he thought she was kind. Sweet. Gentle. Eager to learn, and eager to please, but he never thought she was falling in love with him. She held herself too carefully. Held herself too separate.

“I’m a queen,” she said to him once, a few days after he fell into bed with her on Tarth and then never left. “After Renly, I decided that they could never see me like that again. I don’t know when _they_ turned from _the press_ to _everyone_ , but it felt safer that way. I didn’t think it would ever hurt anyone.” She shook her head and laughed at herself, and he’d laughed with her and kissed her and threw his body into showing her exactly what he thought about her. What he felt about her.

He thinks about it often, now. How she didn’t mean to hide away from him. How she didn’t think she _was_. But she did. If he hadn’t come to Tarth on a whim…

When he got that money back, and Chataya told him that Brienne was insistent it be returned, he had been annoyed. He wanted to confront her. He devised a reason to go to Tarth to confront her. Make her take the money back. Expose himself as a fool who fell for a client and who didn’t feel right taking her money, because she was paying him for the only time in his life he’d felt appreciated and wanted in that specific way. But when he saw her face… when her eyes locked on his and she saw him standing at the bottom of the stairs…those shields she was so good at deploying didn’t deploy quickly enough, and he saw…something.

He’s gotten better now at reading her. Now that he knows what he’s looking for. It’s like being given a key to unlock a cipher. He knows what certain things mean. She is no longer so much a mystery, but there are still parts of her he hasn’t unlocked, and he thinks that that is what is causing the most trouble.

He just. He doesn’t know. If she can weather it, when the scandal breaks.

She has promised him that she can. She has promised him that it’s nothing she hasn’t prepared for. But she was so afraid to let him see her. To let him touch her. To let him do anything at first. He could see her anticipation of humiliation in every gesture. One of the first things he learned to read on her. And now she thinks that she can face all of it? Face their scorn and their ridicule? Not his. This time, not his. Just everyone else in the world. How can she be ready for that?

* * *

It’s selfish to stay. He knows this. He feels it every time a guest or a dignitary arrives on Tarth and spots him. Whether he’s in the library or in the Great Hall or wandering the shops down by the dock. Brienne teases him as vain, and maybe he is. Surely not _every_ undersecretary or assistant or minor noble cousin recognizes him. Jaime doesn’t recognize any of them, but that doesn’t mean much. It’s so hard to keep track sometimes. He’s been with such a lot of people.

And that’s another thing that bothers him, though he knows that it isn’t rational. He was Brienne’s first. He first kiss, she has admitted to him. The first person ever fucked her. The first person who ever touched her like he has touched her. Does it bother her, knowing that she has not been his first anything? His first time falling in love, maybe, but that’s…he wonders if that’s enough. He knows people can be precious about their bodies. He knows Brienne was, once. She laughs about it now like it was never important to her, but he wonders. So much wondering, and maybe he should just _ask_ her. Maybe that would be less horrible than he thinks. But he’s afraid.

It’s not that he has never been afraid before. He has been afraid plenty, throughout his life. He was afraid the first time he saw Cersei drunk and out of control with it. He was afraid the first time he had to watch Cersei’s children overnight, when she was too far gone to care for them. He was afraid when his father died and he realized that he had spent the last five years of his father’s life trying to provoke him, and that he never got any sort of resolution to all the difficult things that remained between them. He was afraid the first time he offered his body in exchange for money, and there have been times when he has been afraid of it since, of wondering if he’s doing something he shouldn’t. Wondering if he made the right choices. Seeing other paths growing rapidly smaller, the more he chose, the more he threw himself recklessly down a path that had no exit, like a hall without doors.

But this is a new kind of fear. Or maybe it’s an old fear repackaged, presented as something new. It’s this fear that he is seeing so much better than others what is going to happen. He saw it when his father went after the Westerlands throne, trying to manipulate his way to the top. He warned his father what was coming. He was the only one who wasn’t surprised when Olenna intervened and exposed generations of family scandals that brought Tywin to his knees. He was the only one who saw Cersei about to spiral like she did. Her two children, born of a father she never named, didn’t see it. Tyrion didn’t see it. Cersei’s friends didn’t see it. When she crashed the car and was hauled away to jail time and then rehab, he was the only one who wasn’t surprised.

And this? He can see it. Brienne can’t. She’s convinced that he’s jumping at shadows, but maybe it’s just that he’s seeing the inconvenient things that she doesn’t want to see. There _will_ be a scandal. She _will_ pay for it. She’ll be his champion, he has no doubt. And he even believes that she can handle anything that will be thrown at her.

But what will be the price of that? Will she still love him when he has been the cause of so much torment? When she realizes that he was right, and that it’s the Renly scandal again, and when it brings all those horrible feelings back, will she still look at him the way she does now?

She has made her wants clear. She has made more and more space for him in her home, and he feels like he belongs on Tarth, in her castle, in a way he has never belonged anywhere else.

But he cannot stop feeling like the more he has, the more he stands to lose.

There is an uncomfortable amount of awareness in him, tied up in the rest. It isn’t that he did it on purpose. Chose a life of temporary passions and closed himself away from love. It isn’t like he realized he was doing it. But now that he’s facing _love,_ he has to wonder if there was a part of him that hid his heart away intentionally. Without even knowing. Because love is _terrifying_ , isn’t it? It was frightening when she was the queen and he was the hired, retired professional. It was frightening because he thought that the best he could hope for would be returned affections and a clandestine affair. But this is worse. Now the fear is that love will not be enough, in the face of everything else.

He could have prevented it, he thinks. Turned off his heart the way he often turned off his mind. Gone away, made himself cold and unwelcoming to any tender feelings. That’s not very romantic, but he thinks he could have done it. Ignored and ignored and turned away until he was able to wrestle his emotions to the ground. He did not have to allow her blue eyes to pierce him. He did not have to allow her quiet laugh, her insecurities, her gentleness to speak to him in the way they did. He could have prevented this, but he didn’t, because he was selfish, and now he’s selfish still. Every day he spends here is selfish. Selfish because he should leave her alone, selfish because he’s going to ruin her, selfish because he’s falling more and more in love with her, and she is falling in love with him in turn, and with every day that passes, he is more convinced that this has no happy ending.

* * *

He is lying on his stomach one night in the middle of her bed, alone. Brienne hasn’t come to bed yet, and he’s not sure why. She had a meeting late, but surely not _this_ late. He thinks about what he would do, if he felt like he had the right. Leave the room. Go in search of her. She might be sitting up in Evenfall’s big old library, puzzling out some problem. The meeting was with her minister of agriculture, and she hadn’t seemed pleased with what he was saying when Jaime caught a glimpse of their conversation through the open door, earlier, on his way to the kitchen. He hasn’t seen her since. They didn’t come to dinner, and she didn’t come to bed, and he can’t sleep. He can’t stop thinking about all the things he would be able to do if he wasn’t _him_.

Her first. He thinks about it a lot. He knows that some people prize being someone’s first, but Jaime can’t see why. He keeps thinking that she doesn’t realize what she could have. That she’s naive. That she fell in love with the first person who treated her kindly, and that she should have waited for someone better. And now here he is, in her bed alone, waiting for her. It’s not like he thinks she’s fucking the minister of agriculture. But maybe she _should_ be fucking the minister of agriculture. Or someone less boring, maybe, but still. Someone who could help her. Someone who could advance her political career.

He knows what she would say if he said these things, so he never does. _Advance my political career?_ she would ask, amused. _I’m already queen, Jaime. How much farther do you think I could go?_ And she’s right, and he’s just broken inside, damaged by years of his father constantly climbing. _You could marry Addam_ , Jaime would say. _Combine the two kingdoms._

_Yes,_ she would reply. _I’m sure the other kingdoms would feel just_ great _about that. That wouldn’t cause problems at all._

And it would go nowhere, because she would be right, and because Jaime is just a self-loathing idiot.

When the door finally creaks open, he turns over his shoulder to look, and Brienne smiles sheepishly at him. She doesn’t bother to turn on a light. Just sheds her clothing as she makes her way to the bed, bathed in moonlight like some kind of half-formed dream. He remembers the blue light in her hotel room in King’s Landing. She had looked otherworldly in it. Strong and womanly and beautiful in a way that made his heart clench, and in a way that makes his heart clench still when he thinks about it. Now, in any light, he sees her beauty. 

“I thought you’d be asleep,” she says. He shakes his head, face still pressed against the pillow, and stifles a yawn. He watches her. She’s naked when she finally reaches the bed, and she pulls back the covers and slides in gratefully, sighing, settling herself half atop him, kissing the back of his neck as she settles in. A weight on his back that he takes comfort in, always.

“What happened?” he asks. He doesn’t feel like he has the right to ask, but he asks anyway. That’s what this whole thing is. Knowing he doesn’t have the right. Feeling like he’s breaking some rule by asking. Being soft and surprised when she answers.

“The yield was a lot less than we’d hoped for, going into winter,” Brienne says. She pulls the covers up over both of them, and Jaime sighs and turns onto his back. She lays beside him, puts an arm around him, pulls him close. His head is tucked into her shoulder. Her hand is in his hair. He likes it like this. He told her once that he liked being held by her, and it was true. He always feels on the verge of collapse, lately. But this, here, with just them. It’s safe. It’s worth it. It’s why he keeps wanting to be selfish about this.

“What’s the plan?” he asks.

“We’ll need to organize a stronger trade deal with Olenna or Addam,” she says.

“Both love you.”

“Mm. It won’t be so difficult. But we’ll need a lot to get through the winter, and we don’t have much to offer. Marble makes a good export, but not for a trade deal.”

_You could marry Addam_ , he thinks. _Marriage alliance, like the old days_. He doesn’t say it aloud. What’s wrong with him, anyway? Why can’t he just be happy? Take it as it comes?

“You’ll figure it out,” he says, and she smiles down at him. She kisses him. He kisses her in return. _Just be happy_ , he thinks. _Just be happy with her. It isn’t that difficult. I don’t know why you always have to make such a mess of things._

“I will,” she says, and there is so much confidence. He wants to laugh, but he doesn’t. Gods, how they’ve changed. “You’re thinking too much,” she says. He shrugs one shoulder, which only makes him nestle closer to her. He breathes in the warmth and the softness of her skin.

“I was thinking about marriage alliances,” he admits. “And the old days. My father always wanted to marry my sister off to Addam, but Addam wasn’t interested.”

“I can’t imagine so, no. He’d be more likely to marry you.”

“Well, right. And it’s not a thousand years ago. Things were probably simpler, then.”

“I suppose that’s true. You think I should just marry Addam for his grain stores?” She’s laughing. Jaime grins at her.

“Well, it’s an idea,” he says, and she laughs and kisses him and kisses him until he stops thinking about it, but it doesn’t leave. Not really.

* * *

The fight starts because of an event on Tarth. A ribbon-cutting ceremony for a new museum, of all things. He’s invited.

“You don’t have to stand at my shoulder or anything,” she says, when she sees him hesitating. “But you’re a guest. You’re more than welcome.”

So he dresses up. Wears a nice suit. Smiles at Brienne when she wears a nicer one. He whispers dirty things in her ear while she’s brushing her scant makeup over her cheeks and under her eyes. She laughs, and messes up her eyeliner, and laughs again.

But when they are outside, he becomes another person. A different Jaime. The Jaime his father once wanted him to be, maybe. He shakes hands, he smiles, he laughs pleasantly at not-very-funny jokes. Eyes are on him. Always on him. Brienne’s eyes are on him too, and she’s frowning. She introduces him in her speech as “Jaime Lannister, an honored guest of Tarth”. Publicly aligning with any Lannister would be risky. There will be whispers. But him specifically...the more attention it gets, the closer they are to scandal.

* * *

“If you had advisors, they would be furious with you,” he says to her, when they’re back in her room. He’s struggling to unknot his tie; his hands are fumbling, oddly cold. Brienne watches him carefully as she undresses. He hates it, the quiet calm with which she can greet these things. He rips the tie loose at last and flings it across the room.

“Is that what you are, then? My advisor.”

“You know I’m not.”

“But you _are_ furious.”

“Yes,” he agrees. Spitting the word out. He closes his eyes. Takes several bracing breaths. He always said he would not be his father. Never say cruel things in a moment of anger. It destroyed his confidence as a boy, and he knows it left its mark on his siblings, warping them almost as badly as their social fall. He has done so well at not becoming Tywin. And he especially doesn’t want to become Tywin here, with her.

“Jaime,” she says, patiently. He turns to face her.

“You keep telling me you understand, but you don’t.”

“What you’re feeling?” she asks, kindly. Still so fucking kind. It shouldn’t make him angry. Not at her. It should make him angry with himself. Maybe he _is_ angry with himself.

“What you’re facing,” he says. She sighs, as he knew she would. When they first met, she always held herself so stiffly. There was a time, after he arrived on Tarth but before now, when he was overjoyed by the fact that she held herself more loosely in his presence. The tension leaving her. He thought it meant something. Maybe it does, but it’s not something he wants it to mean any longer. He doesn’t want her to be so secure in this. In him. He doesn’t want her to be so comfortable. Can’t she see?

“We’ve talked about this,” she says.

“No, we haven’t. Because you just brush it aside, every time. Like it’s not important. But it _is._ You still don’t…” He’s frustrated to the point of wordlessness. Not something that often happens. He turns away again, paces across the room to the window. He can see the road to the village from here. There are people walking down it, enjoying the sunshine. A tour group leaving. And he’s here, right above them. The queen’s secret shame. For how long? _I wouldn’t want it to remain hidden forever._ She’d said that, or near enough to it, and Jaime thought…at the time, he’d thought that there was not anything that someone could say to him that would be more romantic than that. Someone willing to be open, and public. But he is just an old fool who was thinking too much of romance, of what he _wanted_ , than of what was possible. He cannot be that old fool. Not when it means the ruin of the one person he…

Well, maybe not ruin. Maybe he shouldn’t go that far. She’d get out of it, somehow. He has faith in that. She’s such an unwavering force of a person. She would figure it out. Fight through the storm. It’s not like they’d run her out of her queendom, he’s pretty sure. But they would judge her, and mock her, and hurt her, and he doesn’t want to be a party to that. He isn’t worth it.

“I can’t do it anymore,” he says. She looks at him carefully. Steadily. She nods.

* * *

She doesn’t judge him. That’s the worst part. She doesn’t fight him, doesn’t call him a coward. She treats it like a choice made from mature consideration, and not a choice made from panic. It _is_ a choice made from panic, but it’s a mature one too, he thinks. _I can’t_ , he says, and she believes him.

He is used to less healthy resolutions. Every relationship he’s ever been around…his parents seemed happy, but they might have been the only ones. Tyrion was married briefly as little more than a child, but that relationship went sour fast. And Cersei…it was better not to tally her difficulties in love. Jaime was expecting something similar. Some explosion. Some shouting. But Brienne only nods, and she tells him that she’s not keeping him.

He finds his way to his guest room. He has to ask Brienne where it is. She tells him, very kindly. He feels like he’s spiraling. Like he’s a madman and she’s humoring him. He sulks in his empty bed all night, feeling cold and unwanted and unloved, even though he knows that the problem is exactly the opposite. Too wanted. Too loved. She cares too much about him to see the signs, and he has to protect her.

In the middle of the night, he gets out of bed, and he almost gives up. Almost returns to her room. Crawls into her bed. She’d let him. She’d let him say whatever hurtful shit he needed to say to warn her, and then she would smile at him and touch him and kiss him and fuck him like nothing had changed. What does she see? What could she possibly care about? Is it just that he is still attractive? Is it just that he wants her? Her first. She could find someone else. Someone better.

He stays in his bed.

In the morning, when the sun is barely up, she knocks on his door. He’s dressed, and has spent a chilly hour sitting in a chair on the balcony and looking out at the ocean. Brienne sits in the chair beside him. She looks tired. Her eyes are red.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

“It’s all right,” she replies. It’s a lie, and he laughs dryly. He shakes his head. She sits stiffly, the way she did at first, and he has this cracked-heart moment of thinking that all the work he did, all the careful easing into trust, is gone. He destroyed it so quickly. She looks out at the ocean, instead of looking at him. “I should have realized you weren’t comfortable.”

“It isn’t about me,” he says.

“ _I’m_ not uncomfortable,” she tells him, and she finally looks at him, and there’s this mingled pity and sadness and affection in her expression. Sadness for herself, maybe, but for him, too, and it cracks his heart further, like someone has punched him in the chest and broken his ribs and stolen his breath.

“It’s _for_ you,” he says.

“Don’t say that,” she says. She sounds tired, now. Tired, miserable. She looks at him, and the morning wind blows her hair around her face, and he can’t stop looking at her, because he keeps thinking about packing his bags. Finding all the shit that he has left strewn around her rooms. Getting on that ferry, or on a plane, to take him back to King’s Landing. His old life. The life he left for her. He keeps thinking about it, and thinking about how she will be here, in this castle, this life she’s built for herself. She was doing so well without him. She doesn’t need him. But she’s looking at him like she’ll miss him, like he’s already gone, and she’s memorizing him as much as he is memorizing her, and he can’t take it.

“They will tear you apart,” he says.

“It’s _you_ they’ll be exposing.”

“And you they’ll be ridiculing.”

“I can take that.”

“After what the Renly scandal did? Brienne, this will be worse.”

“It won’t,” she says.

“You can’t seriously believe that. Westeros is better than it was. It’s come a long way. But it’s still so fucking…you know they’ll say horrible things.”

“Yes.”

“You know they won’t believe me.”

“Yes. I do.”

“It’ll be worse than Renly.”

“Do you love me?” she asks. He shakes his head, though of course the answer is _yes_. She knows this. She wears a grim, pointed expression. “Renly didn’t love me,” she says. “It’s different.”

“It’s not enough.”

“It will be.”

“You’ll hate me for it.” The truth of it, at last, wrung from him. He didn’t want to say it. Maybe because it sounds so much like a judgement of her. It isn’t meant to be. It’s just inevitable. She’s staring at him like she doesn’t understand, though he doesn’t know how that’s possible. It’s just _true_. It’s just the _truth_. “You think you won’t. You think you’ll stand by me, and watch your approval ratings plummet, and you think you’ll be happy because we’re together. But I’m not enough to sustain that.”

“Of course you are.”

“I’m _not_. You’re mad for thinking otherwise.”

“You’re afraid.”

“Yes, I am. And you should be too. You _were_ , when we met.”

Brienne smiles a little. She still looks drawn, haunted.

“I was,” she agrees. “But I’m not anymore.”

“You should be,” he insists. She shrugs.

“I’m not,” she replies.

* * *

Somehow, they end up in his cold, empty guest bed.

“I can’t stay,” he tells her. “I can’t ruin this.” But she kisses him anyway.

“I know,” she says, and her face is wet when he pulls away to look at her, and he kisses her tears away, and he gives her every desperate part of himself. He has never, he doesn’t think, fucked like this before. He has never felt so much, so many powerful things, so many terrible things. He is terrified to kiss her, and to touch her, and terrified for it to be over. When it is, he collapses beside her, and he wants to fall asleep again. Sleep until late afternoon. Sleep until tomorrow. He can’t. Brienne lies beside him, her arm over her eyes, and she heaves a deep, cracked sigh before she sits up. Her side of the bed has barely been warmed by her heat.

She dresses, not looking back at him. She looks at herself in the mirror. Neatens her hair. Straightens her clothing. When she looks back at him, she’s the same woman she was when they first met. He’s not the only one who’s handy with a mask.

“I have to go to King’s Landing,” she says. “The gala.” She doesn’t wait for him to respond. She doesn’t look away from him. Her jaw ticks. She’s wearing the necklace he bought her, months ago. He didn’t notice it until now. He thinks about the fact that she put it on before coming to see him this morning. He thinks about what that means. “I’ll be back in three days. If you want to wait until then to hash things out, fine. If you’d rather leave while I’m gone…” She doesn’t finish. Just shrugs. Looks down at the ground briefly. The only sign of struggle. He feels very small, in his stupid guest bed, in this stupid castle. Why’d he have to fall in love with a queen? What was he thinking? She meets his eyes. “I love you,” she tells him. “You are enough for me. I am willing to face the scandal with you. Don’t put it on me, that you can’t.”

“It’s not on you,” he manages, though his voice creaks dryly, and his heart pounds, and he has never felt so wretched in all his life. “It’s _for_ you.”

“Don’t say that,” she says again. “If you knew as much as you think, you wouldn’t.”

She gives him another long look, and he looks at her in turn. She’s beautiful, still. Beautiful here, in this unfamiliar room. He does not want her to leave, and he wants to beg her to come back to bed, and he wants to say that he’s a fool, and a monster, and not worth half of the patience she has wasted on him. _I’m sorry,_ he wants to say. _I can’t do it. It will hurt you. I can’t be selfish. I want to be selfish so badly. Please._ He doesn’t say any of it. She turns and walks out of the room.

* * *

She leaves without saying anything else to him. She leaves her necklace on her bed. The clasp is broken. His stuff is piled neatly in his drawers, and it doesn’t take very long to pack. He lingers in her room anyway. Running his fingers along the silk sheets she bought when he complained that she was a queen who slept on burlap. He fixes the clasp on the necklace, and he puts it with the rest of her jewelry. He stands on the balcony in her room. _Their_ room, she used to call it, but he fucked that up.

He books a flight to King’s Landing for the following morning. He tells Tyrion that he’s coming home. Tyrion sends him an emoji that’s skeptical, side-eyed. He doesn’t ask for details.

When Jaime’s phone rings in the middle of the night, he assumes it will be Tyrion, finally caving out of curiosity.

Instead, it is Olenna.

“What did you do?” she asks. Jaime rubs sleep from his eyes. He’s in Brienne’s room, still. None of the stewards or servants have appeared to kick him bodily out of the castle, so he assumed it was fine. His bags are waiting by the door. There’s a car coming to take him to the port in a few hours.

“What?” he asks Olenna. Sleep bleary.

“Brienne took a flight to King’s Landing on her own.”

“Yes, I’m not with her.”

“So I ask again: what did you do, you foolish boy?”

“I wasn’t going to be her date anyway,” he points out. They’d never even discussed it. Brienne mentioned the gala a few times. Just an appearance she would have to make. Jaime had a few odd dreams about appearing on her arm at it. Stress dreams, where he’d remember halfway through the night that he’d fucked half the guests and that he was going to be exposed to Brienne as some kind of fraud. Like she didn’t already know exactly what he was. But Brienne had never asked him to attend, and he had never asked if he was expected. It was just another thing they didn’t talk about.

“You’re not telling me you didn’t do anything.”

“No, I’m just wondering why you assume I did.”

“Because I’m an old woman, and when you’re an old woman, you either get very sharp or very dull, and I have chosen the former. She can smile at me and deflect my questions all she likes, but I know the look of heartbreak.”

Jaime sighs, and he lays back, and he squeezes his eyes shut. _Meddlesome cow_.

“It would destroy her,” he says.

“Breaking her heart?”

“No. That’s only wounded her. She’ll be fine.”

Olenna sighs.

“Well you’re not a narcissist like your sister, at least. Even if you _are_ a fool. Yes, she will survive your little bout of nobility. You’re right about that, even if you’re right about very little else. She’d survive the scandal too.”

“I don’t think they’re going to stone her in the streets, no.”

“No, you just think that she’ll be so consumed by the poor opinions of the rabble that she’ll pick up the stones and try to do the job herself.”

“Not sure that’s how that works.”

“Ah, so you’re a pendant like your brother.”

“I don’t enjoy being compared to my siblings.”

“Neither would I, if I had the ones you’ve been saddled with. Jaime, listen to me. I like you. I have liked you for a very long time. I understand why you’re doing this, even if I think you’re a fool for it. Margaery wants to flay you alive, but she understands it, too. Brienne is a wonderful girl, and none of us want to watch her go through it. But she is stronger than you think.”

“I know how strong she is.”

“If you knew how strong she was, you’d have been on that plane with her.”

“It would be my fault,” he says. “If. If something happened. If she was unhappy. It would be my fault, and she would blame me.”

“Do you really think that? It wouldn’t be your _fault_. Brienne has made a choice. Just because it would be _for_ you, it doesn’t make it your fault.”

He sighs stubbornly. Stares at the ceiling.

“If I stay, she’ll hate me,” he says. “Not right away, maybe. But eventually.”

“Maybe she will. Maybe I’m wrong about her. Maybe her love will turn into resentment, and maybe she will be humiliated, and maybe she will pinpoint you as the cause. But I am so seldom wrong that I really can’t even consider it.”

“Now who sounds like Tyrion?”

“Upstart little shit. I know you know I’m right.”

“I don’t want to be the cause of her pain. I…I don’t...I can’t…”

He can’t _think_. It’s too early, or late, and he’s too sad and too scared and too...he doesn’t know.

“You think I don’t understand?” Olenna asks, gently. “I told you: I’m very sharp. And what happened to your family was not your fault. Another man would have blamed me entirely. Your brother does. Your sister. Your father did too, no doubt. Never mind, of course, that I warned him. Never mind that I showed him the cards I held, quite willingly, and told him that I would not hesitate to use them. He tried to run me over anyway. I’m sure you warned him, too.”

He _had_. He had warned his father constantly, but his father hadn’t wanted to listen. Nor had Cersei. Nor had Tyrion. All of them wrapped up in their own ideas of what power meant, and their own ideas of what they would do when they had it.

He had warned Addam out of desperation. Only when he knew there was no stopping it. And Addam must have gone to Olenna.

“I would have done it anyway,” she says, as if reading his mind. “Your father’s goals would have destabilized Westeros. I like our kingdoms the way they are, and I have no desire to see them shifted and warring again. History was always one of my favorite subjects as a girl, and unlike most of the idiots on their gilded thrones, I learned my lessons from it. Nobody benefits in wars like that. The Tyrell line was almost wiped out once, eons ago. You know that.”

“I do.”

“So were the Lannisters.”

“Yes. I know that too.”

“Your father forgot. He forgot how difficult it is to build a lasting legacy and how easy it is to lose it. He forgot, and you were a child.”

“I wasn’t a child.”

“As good as. You’re still a child to me.” He huffs a reluctant laugh, and he can hear the smile in her voice. “No smart reply to that?”

“I’m not feeling very smart at the moment.”

“No. But you’re also not the dullard you seem to think you are. I know you tried to help them, Jaime. You’ve been trying your entire life. But it isn’t your fault that they weren’t able to recognize that.”

“I don’t…” Jaime starts, but his voice cracks, and he can’t finish it.

“You tried to get your sister into rehab before her crash. Three times. I know the lengths you went to to keep it secret, to keep your family’s name out of the papers. I know you tried to get your father to take care of himself, even though you hated him. I know you’ve tried over the years to help Tyrion in all his failed business endeavors and in all his failed romantic relationships. Bailing him out. Giving him the money you earned, again and again, even though he has never learned, and you know he never will. You let him take Cersei’s children because he thought he would be a better guardian, and yet you’re the one paying for their nannies and their tutors and taking them on trips, paying for everything with your whoring while he _chases_ whores and bad investments. No one could ever blame you for your family’s failures except for them, and you should know better than to believe them.”

“Maybe I’m not as sharp as you think,” he says.

“You are. But it’s a difficult thing, to let go of things you’ve carried since you were a child. You did not have a good father, Jaime. You had a wonderful mother, but she was gone too soon, and your father got his claws in you early. He made his choices, and he made his mistakes. They weren’t yours. You _tried_. I know you did. And when he failed, you still tried to do the right thing, and to help them. I will never judge you for that. For what you did to earn that money, for why you did it, for how you feel about them. I know family can be a very complicated thing, and I sympathize. But I cannot sit by and watch you destroy this chance at happiness. Blame me, if you have to. I certainly pulled enough strings and led your family to where they are now. But don’t blame yourself. It wasn’t your fault. It never was, and if your family was half as worthy as they think they are, they never would have blamed you either. And if Brienne is rocked by the scandal, it won’t be your fault. If she hates you, it won’t be your fault. She is an adult woman, and she has chosen you, and she loves you. She has chosen to weather the storm, and if she cannot keep her footing, it will have _still_ been her choice. As painful as it will be for you to endure, I know. It still won’t be your fault.”

“And my choice?” he asks.

“Is yours. You’re right. I’m not telling you that you can’t. I’m not telling you, even, that it isn’t an unselfish choice to make. I told you: she would survive, and I understand. It’s frightening to care for someone so much, isn’t it? Realizing that you would do anything for them, even torpedo your own happiness. We are selfish creatures at our cores, Jaime. A love so powerful that it makes us selfless is astonishing. The first time I held my son in my arms, I was terrified to realize I would die for him. It’s an odd thing, to find out that you have the capacity for it. I know it must have been exhausting, to love so much, and so intensely, and to have it shoved away every time. It can’t have been easy.”

“No,” he agrees, reluctantly. He hates to hear it said like that, mostly because he knows it’s true. He has tried so hard not to be bitter, not to turn into Cersei or Tyrion or his father. Not to resent the love that he has not been given. It isn’t that he thinks Brienne is anything like his siblings or even his extended relatives, who delight in pointing out all the ways he has failed to be the worthy successor that his father dreamed of. He knows she isn’t like them. He knows that it’s unlikely that she’ll grow to resent him the way they have. But it’s terrifying to face the possibility of it. Maybe it’s selfish to be so scared when he should just _trust_ Brienne. But he loves her. He knows now that he loves her, and he knows now that it would destroy him to lose her in increments. Better to lose her now, all at once. By his choice.

_She still will be lost_ , he thinks.

She will survive it, and so will he. He has survived a lot of things that haven’t killed him, and leaving now would just be another. But Olenna’s right. It’s hard. It has _been_ hard. And holding on to this relationship with Brienne by the tips of his fingers seems…desperate. It feels desperate. He _is_ desperate. Nothing in his life has ever worked out. No one has ever stayed, or cared for him the longer they know him. _It’s not your fault,_ Olenna keeps saying, but it must be. Everyone in his life has abandoned him, or hated him, or resented him for not being enough. Surely his entire family can’t be the problem, can they? Surely there must be something wrong with him, something deeply unlovable, something that twists and breaks every scrap of affection that people have for him and turns it into loathing.

“Jaime,” Olenna says, gently. More gently than she’s ever said anything to him, which makes him feel more pathetic than ever. “You are a good man. I’m never wrong about these things. And it wasn’t your fault.”

“Stop saying that,” he says.

“I won’t. Because it’s true, and because you don’t believe it. You cannot be responsible for the actions of others. You cannot be responsible for how they react to things. The world does not make room for people. People must make room for themselves. Sometimes we forget that, because we’ve had so much handed to us through our lives, but you’ve learned it. And you’ve pushed on stubbornly, trying to drag your siblings in your wake, and all it did was make them resent you for not being dragged down like them. They couldn’t let go, and they resented you for being able. Moving on. Being happy. Making choices that weren’t related to the thing that your father told them was all that they were meant for. If you stay with Brienne, and if the scandal breaks, it will not destroy her. It will not bring her down. She isn’t your sister, and she isn’t your brother, and she isn’t any of those numerous uncles and aunts and cousins who still scrabble desperately for relevance. Brienne will stick by her choices, and she will be proud to have made them. And I promise you, when the scandal breaks, I will stand beside her. And I won’t be the only one. There are more people in your corner than you think.”

There is not much to say after that. Platitudes. She promises not to tell anyone he’s crying, and he calls her an old bat and tells her to fuck off, which makes her laugh fondly. She also tells him that Margaery booked him an earlier flight, and so he goes.

He does not think about what to say to Brienne. He doesn’t think about it on the flight. He sleeps on the flight. He doesn’t think about it when he gets to his hotel room and changes into his nice suit. He doesn’t think about it when he gets into the elevator, when he gets into the car he hired, when he drives to the gala. He thinks of nothing. His head is empty of thoughts.

He has overthought so much since he met Brienne. Trying to interpret and trying to react to things before they had a chance to happen. He doesn’t know why he can’t seem to think of anything now, but he _can’t_. He isn’t even nervous. He just…exists. Puts one foot in front of the other. Walks into the Red Keep, into the ballroom.

It doesn’t take him long to find Brienne. She is standing with Addam, and Margaery is at her side. Margaery is laughing, speaking pleasantly, but her eyes are on Jaime the entire time he approaches, and her smile for him is soft. He thought it would make him feel exposed, or weak, or prickly, but it doesn’t. _I understand_ , it says. All of them understand, and it’s possible they understood before he did. Both that he loves Brienne and that he has been so afraid of tainting her with his past, and with the indelible thing he seems to have that drives people away and turns them against him.

Brienne turns, when she catches Margaery’s eyeline, and nothing shows on her face. She does not seem surprised to see him. She smiles. She doesn’t seem pleased, either, though. Jaime doesn’t wonder if he has made a mistake. Maybe he did. It’s too late to go back now.

“A word, please, your grace?” he asks. She rolls her eyes. Her stiff smile is replaced by a slightly fonder one. She nods, and she excuses herself. Addam gives him a thumbs up.

There are eyes on him. Whispers about him. He knows this. He can see it, and he knows it isn’t just paranoia. Camera shutters flicker across the room, and maybe they’re catching pictures of he and Brienne heading to the food table together, but maybe they’re not. There are other people here. Famous people. They might not care about him at all. But the photographs will exist, and he will not be able to get Olenna to make these ones disappear.

“Who convinced you?” she asks. “Was it Margaery? I told her not to call you.”

“Her grandmother,” Jaime says. Brienne seems surprised by that. “We’re old friends.”

“ _Oh_!” Brienne says, and Jaime cannot help but laugh.

“No,” he says. “She did hire me once, but it was just to offer me a job in her office. A way out, in case it was what I wanted. Back at the beginning. And when I said I wanted to stay, she put me in touch with Chataya.”

Brienne doesn’t seem surprised to hear that; she smiles a little, soft, and her eyes seek out Olenna across the room, where she sits surrounded by fawning acolytes that she brushes away like bothersome flies. Olenna catches them watching her, and she nods at them both. She’s proud. He can tell that. She’s an easier study than Brienne.

Because Brienne still isn’t. Even after months. Even after coming to know her. She’s bold, and nervous, and quiet, and loud, and she is a study in contradictions, and he doesn’t think he will ever get tired of learning her. But she is very much a mystery still in some ways, and Jaime is not so secure in himself yet that he can’t wonder if she would rather he leave. If maybe the easy out was one she was glad he gave her. He doesn’t think so. He thinks that she wants him here. He thinks that her heart felt lightened to see him. He thinks that she has been miserable and heartbroken, like Olenna said. He thinks. He feels. He hopes.

“What did she say?” she asks quietly.

“That it’s your choice.”

“It’s your choice as well,” Brienne reminds him, not understanding what he means.

“I have always,” he starts, hesitates. Says, “blamed myself. In part. For what happened to my family. Olenna was the one who laid the trap, but…I warned Addam what my father was up to, and he went to Olenna for help, and so she stopped my father. I know it was the right thing. I don’t blame her for it, and I have never blamed Addam. But everything that happened afterward…they were never the same. I tried. I tried to save my sister. I tried to help Tyrion build a life outside politics. I failed them.”

“Jaime,” Brienne says, but he shakes his head. He does not need to be comforted. Not yet. He needs to be understood. He cannot keep letting her cut him off and soothe him.

“I have given most of my life to other people. Not just my body. Not just…this. But to my family. My money to them. My efforts to them. All of it. And for that, they hate me. Sometimes they’re good at hiding it, and I forget. But they can’t talk to me without sneering, and they can’t love me. Not the way I love them. My niece and nephew, maybe. But they’ll learn soon enough.”

“Jaime,” she sighs again.

“Or maybe they won’t. Maybe it’s only Tyrion and Cersei who are destined to hate me more the more that I love them. I don’t know. I didn’t even know what it was that made me so afraid. But I thought of being the reason you go through another fucking Renly scandal, and I knew…”

“I wouldn’t.” Brienne’s voice is strong, unwavering. Undoubting. “I wouldn’t hate you.”

“I know,” he says. Amends to, “I hope I know. I trust, maybe.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t try to understand.”

“You did. I just didn’t know how to explain it. I thought it was better to lose you all at once than to lose you over years. See your expression change. See you begin to hate me. It was a while before I noticed it in my siblings. In my father, even. I worried that one day, I’d notice it in you.”

“And now?” Brienne asks. “How do you feel about it now?”

“I think…There is a chance that I might not lose you at all. And I think I love you enough to take it.”

“You won’t lose me,” she says. She sounds so sure. “Do you believe me?”

He gives the question the weight it deserves. He is still afraid to be wrong, but that’s not quite the same as _believing_ he will be wrong.

“Yes,” he says. “I believe you.”

* * *

The scandal hasn’t broken yet. It will. It’s only a matter of time. Addam came out to the press three days ago as bisexual with a preference for men. It has the stink of Olenna on it. Brienne tells Jaime that Addam was thinking about doing it already, but she doesn’t dismiss his concerns like she did before. She knows better now why he has them.

_It’s not your fault,_ Olenna said, and Brienne has said it since. _It won’t be your fault. I won’t blame you_. He believes her when she says it, even though he knows that logically there’s no way for him to know if that’s true. She doesn’t dismiss his fears, and she doesn’t make him feel pathetic for having them, but she understands them, and she treads carefully around them, and he loves her for it.

He loves her for all of it, more and more. The dark cloud is still there, waiting. A scandal hovering over them. About to break. But he has faith now that they will weather the storm.

She puts a box down on the table in front of him one evening, when they’re getting ready for another event. A ribbon-cutting. He’s going to be her date. It is months since the gala. Months, and this is more time than he thought they’d get. Olenna called him, this morning. Warned him that Varys is almost ready to publish. He knows. Brienne knows, too. But she puts that box down on the table in front of him anyway. She doesn’t tell him what it is. She doesn’t need to.

“I’m sure,” she tells him, before he can ask. He nods. He knows she is. He opens the box. It’s a plain band, silver, with three small sapphires embedded in it. He swallows back a surprising lump. He knew what it was, and yet.

“I’m sure, too,” he says. He takes the ring, and he puts it on his finger. “I have one for you, too. In my rooms.”

“Clever, hiding it in the one place we never go.”

She smiles at him. She is so sure of herself, and of him. He can feel it. The band around his finger won’t let him forget, he thinks. He will have trouble forgetting now. He’s relieved.

“I’m a clever man,” he points out. “Quite the social climber, too.”

“You are,” Brienne says with a grin.

“My father would be so proud.”

Brienne snorts to hear his sarcasm, because no, probably not. Tywin would not be satisfied with his elder son as a prince consort. His children will be Tarths. His wife will remain a Tarth. Maybe _he_ will be a Tarth. He hasn’t decided yet. But it doesn’t matter if Tywin wouldn’t be proud. Tywin made his bed, and Tywin died, and Jaime did what he could to help the ones who were left. It isn’t his fault that they didn’t want it. It isn’t his fault that he found a way out. It isn’t his fault that he fell in love with a queen, and that she fell in love with him in turn. It won’t be his fault when people react to the scandal. No matter what happens, it won’t be on him. It is their choice, made together.

“Are you ready?” she asks him. She sounds like she knows the answer. _She’s_ proud, he knows. That matters to him.

“I’m ready,” he says.


End file.
